


only for death he has no cure

by bellowbacks



Series: Star Trek: Alternate Alternate Original Series [1]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 00:41:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13822848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellowbacks/pseuds/bellowbacks
Summary: Jim is dead. Leonard isn't coping well.





	only for death he has no cure

It had been a week since Jim’s death, and for Leonard, that week had been spent helping people after the attack, frantically doing tests upon tests on Khan’s blood, and taking hypos full of anything he needed to stay awake and working. He hadn’t slept yet, since Jim died, because he knew he would be woken up by nightmares. 

Why would he go back to Jim’s quarters to get any of his things when Jim wasn’t here? Just the thought of it made Leonard want to rip his heart out of his chest. 

He had made a couple of variants of the serum that had brought that tribble back to life, but nothing was seeming to work on life forms with any kind of higher intelligence in any of his tests. Leonard was starting to get frustrated, but he knew he could do it. He had discovered the cure for other diseases, and sure, sudden radiation sickness that was so bad that it killed wasn’t exactly a disease, but he had to find something.

He kept telling himself, over and over and over, that Khan’s blood gave him such a huge advantage that he had to find a way to bring Jim back. It wouldn’t be fair if he didn’t. Jim’s death wasn’t fair.

It was this train of thought that carried Leonard to work and work without pause, hunched over his desk in the medbay of the Enterprise. He wore his blue uniform most days, only changing into his white scrubs when he actually had a shift scheduled in medical. Even then, he kept working. 

Leonard knew that people were starting to notice how bad off he was doing, so he started upping his hypo dose, making himself more and more awake as he worked. This only sort of kept them off his back.

“Doctor, you have to rest.”

“I don’t. I’m perfectly fine, Spock.”

“You haven’t eaten in days. This isn’t healthy.”

“Who’s the doctor here? Let me be.”

Spock had been doing this for days now, watching Dr. McCoy pump himself full of synthetic nutrients and caffeine as much as he felt he needed to in order to stay awake and alert enough to work on the cure.

Leonard felt like he was doing fine, his body was reacting how he wanted it to and his brain wasn’t at the natural foggy state that exhaustion brought on, so he figured he could keep going. Keep working. He has to do this. 

That was, until right after he talked to Spock, when his leg spasmed and he collapsed. 

“Doctor!” he heard Spock call out, and then he was out.

-

Leonard woke up to an empty hospital room.

Wait, no, Spock was there. Had he died? Was Leonard in hell? Spock was reading what Leonard assumed were his vitals on a padd next to Leonard’s bed. 

“Doctor, you’re awake,” Spock started, and Leonard sighed.

“No shit,” he said, or tried to. His throat was dry and his voice was weak and raspy. “How long was I out?” he tried to ask and failed, but Spock seemed to understand. 

“37 hours,” was the response. Leonard felt his heart rate increase, and very quickly he was pulling all of the hypo-IVs taped to his skin off and trying to get out of bed. His legs didn’t want to hold him and his muscles were weakened by overuse and then an instant lack of use, so he took a few weak and stumbly steps before finding a sort of painful balance so he could leave the room.

Unfortunately, before he got very far, Spock was stepping effortlessly in front of him. 

“You need to rest. You should know this, doctor,” Spock said, and Leonard could hear a hint of something almost like sarcasm in his voice at that last word. Almost.

“I can’t, I have to work,” Leonard was trying to say, but his vision was already swimming and his legs were already threatening to collapse under him yet again.

“You have to rest,” Spock repeated and, with minimal struggle, got the exhausted doctor back in bed. 

“Jim-” Leonard said desperately, but he knew it was no use. He felt his anxiety growing and his head spinning for just a moment more before a nurse was coming in and pressing a hypo to his neck, rendering him unconscious yet again. 

-

The next time Leonard woke up, he felt better. His body felt less drained and his mind was clearer. Spock wasn’t there this time, and that was definitely also an improvement. He realized that this time there was only one patch taped to his arm, so he peeled it off. It hurt. He didn’t care.

When he tried to stand up, he found it was easier this time and he was able to walk over to the padd Spock had been reading on and check out his information.

But before he could pick it up, the door behind him was opening and someone was entering.

“Leonard,” Nyota Uhura said quietly. 

Leonard didn’t respond, just tried the standard medbay password on the padd to unlock it, to no avail. It must be one of the nurse’s private padds. 

“Leonard, listen to me,” Uhura said again, and he felt a hand touch his back. If she were anybody else, Leonard would have kept ignoring her and trying to get into the padd, but she was Uhura, so he set it down and turned around. 

He met her eyes and he saw pity in them and instantly wished he had never woken up. 

“I don’t want your pity, Nyota,” he said, his voice just as gruff with disuse as the last time he had tried to speak.

“I don’t want to give it,” she responded. He could tell she was being honest, but she couldn’t quite hide the look in her eyes. “I want to tell you what happened, because Spock wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” 

“I don’t know, but I need you to sit down,” Uhura said, and Leonard sighed and walked shakily back over to the bed and sat down on it. He was in Starfleet regulation sweats and a hospital dress, and he realized that the pants were Jim’s the same second he realized what they were. The thought made him want to throw up, but he knew there wasn’t enough in his system for anything more than dry heaving.

“Fine, tell me,” he choked out, desperate to get his mind off the pants just as quickly as the thought had weaseled its way in.

“You overdosed, Bones,” Uhura said, and Leonard tore his gaze away.

“Don’t call me that right now,” he said, and he could even hear the tremor in his voice. It made him feel even sicker than the name did, the thought of seeming weak to someone like Nyota. He could only hear that name in Jim’s voice, teasing, joking, loving, calling, anything. That name was his to say.

“Sorry,” she said, and then again, “You overdosed. You loaded your body so full of synthetic nutrients and caffeine that you physically couldn’t do it anymore. They had to do some sort of infusion in order to keep you breathing, get all the garbage out of your system.”

Leonard didn’t look at her again. Instead, he just stared at the wall of the hospital room. 

“You did this to yourself,” she said, a hint of frustration in her voice. “We all miss Jim, Leonard. We understand how important this is to you. But you can’t kill yourself trying to save him.”

“Why not?” Leonard muttered. “Why not? He sacrificed himself for all of us, it’s the least I can do in return.” He knew he sounded pathetic, but his heart felt black. He knew this was depression, he was a doctor for fuck’s sake, but he couldn’t physically think about anything but his work, Jim, and Jim, Jim, Jim. 

Nyota sighed. “He wouldn’t want this,” she said, and reached out to gently touch Leonard’s knee. He didn’t respond. “Jim wouldn’t want you to destroy yourself for him. He’d be begging you to rest, he would have been days ago,” she continued, softer.

Leonard knew she was right. He knew it, and he hated it, knowing how much Jim would hate his current state. “Could you do me a favor, Nyota?” he asked in an even quieter voice than she had been using. He felt numb.

“Of course,” she responded, squeezing his leg once in an attempt at comfort before pulling away.

“Who brought me these pants?” he asked in little more than a whisper.

“Spock did.”

“These aren’t mine. Could you go to my quarters and get me something else?” Leonard asked, finally looking up to meet her eyes. The pants felt like they were a thousand ants crawling all over his legs. 

“How about I bring you there and you can get them yourself?” Nyota suggested, but she was obviously unsure if this was a good idea. 

Leonard hesitated. He and Jim normally slept in the captain’s quarters, so the CMO’s room- his room?- probably wouldn’t have much of Jim’s stuff. He wasn’t even sure why he still had his own quarters in the first place when he spent every night in Jim’s.

“Fine,” he said with a jerky nod. 

“I did get Spock to get you a real shirt so you could have something to wear on your way there,” she said, and Leonard noticed a bag that she had set down on the bed. He looked inside it and saw that it was a plain sweatshirt that said “Ole Miss” across the front. His heart hurt to look at this too. It was one of Jim’s favorites. It is one of Jim’s favorites.

“Thanks,” he said absently and changed into it, his arms weak as he tried to get it on quickly to hide just how weak his body had gotten. He angled his body away from Uhura so she could only see his back, neither of his sides or his stomach exposed. He didn’t want her to look at him with that pity in her eyes again.

“You’re discharged, by the way. They decided you’re strong enough.” Uhura’s eyes were narrow and her head was tilted slightly to the side, as it was tend to do. 

“I know how to get discharged. I’m normally the one signing off on that,” Leonard said, unable to keep the tinge of bitterness out of his voice. 

Nyota just nodded, and then they both stood and began the walk that, with Leonard’s weak body, seemed more like a triathlon. 

-

It was another two days before Nyota let Leonard resume his research, and during that time Leonard was constantly anxious to the point of throwing up. The first few times he tried to eat after being discharged he actually did throw up, but that was only half anxiety. The other half was a mix between the fact that he had barely eaten anything solid in a week, and that he was drinking again. It had felt like defeat, picking up that bottle after years of sobriety beyond a sip for a toast here and there, but he needed it.

She and Spock alternated coming to make sure Leonard rested at least one entire shift per rotation, as well as ate at least one full meal every day. That kicked up to two meals after a few days, and Bones started feeling sick again, so he only ate about half of each. 

He knew that he was being incredibly unhealthy with how few hours he was sleeping and how little he was eating, but he also knew he was in a deep depression, and these were the symptoms, right? So it was okay, or at least that’s how he rationalized it. He could hear Jim in the back of his head complaining about him, about these new habits, but Jim wasn’t here to stop him, and Nyota and Spock wouldn’t go that far. He knew if he was obsessing over something, he wasn’t going to be able to pull himself out. 

Eventually, the lack of sleep was starting to get frustrating, especially because neither of the power couple would let him have coffee or caffeine after what he had done in the first week.

So, instead of caffeine, he started spending some of the hours he couldn’t spend working trying different kinds of antidepressants until he found one that let him sleep and get out of bed easier but didn’t actually minimize his depression very much, which was what he wanted. Jim didn’t deserve to be pushed aside by drugs. He deserved his constant place in the forefront of Leonard’s mind. He needed his focus.

He kept logs of everything he did. He called them “Doctor’s logs”, and he always did them when he was testing a new vaccine, or a new cure, or anything new. This was definitely new, a cure for death. The tattoo on his ribs seemed to burn, the paragraph of words written down his side detailing his duties as a medical professional. Specifically one line seemed to hurt the worst, the rule he knew he was constantly breaking. 

Above all, I must not play at God.

-

“God, Bones, your hands,” Jim said breathlessly, and Bones exhaled softly, touching Jim’s hip. 

“Jim,” he responded and pulled him closer. 

“Bones,” Jim said, urgently. “Bones!”

“What-” Bones said, jerking up. 

“Bones,” Uhura said, her hands on her hips. Leonard was laying in his bed, tangled in sheets that smelled like clinical laundry soap and nothing like Jim. 

Leonard scrubbed a hands over his face. “I told you not to call me that, Nyota,” he said. “Did I sleep in? I’m sorry, I’ll get to work-” he started, but Nyota threw her hands up.

“No, Leonard. I found this in your office,” she said and reached into the bag hanging at her side, pulling out an empty bottle. The scent of Andorian brandy hit Leonard’s nose and he closed his eyes again, sliding back under the covers of his bed.

“So?” he muttered. 

“You- Len, I’ve been your friend for years now. I know…” she said, trailing off for a moment before continuing. “I’ve been your friend for years. I know that you’ve been sober since we started at the academy.”

Leonard flinched. “Stop,” he said quietly. “Don’t make me feel worse, Nyota. I know.”

“Len…” she said and Leonard could hear her heels clicking on the floor quietly. He heard his sheets rustling and then felt his bed dip slightly with her weight as she sat down. “I know that you’re hurting, and I’m sorry, but you have to understand that Jim would hate this. He would see you destroying yourself, and he would be disappointed.”

Leonard closed his eyes. “What time is it? My alarm hasn’t gone off yet,” he mumbled. He felt numb, like his brain, his blood vessels, and his lungs were all full of cotton. 

Uhura didn’t respond for a moment, and then, “Beta shift is ending in half an hour.”

Leonard pulled his sheets over his head. He was cold, as he had been sleeping in his usual t-shirt and boxers, but the quilt he normally had on his bed was in Jim’s room, and he wasn’t going to go in there. “Fine, thank you Nyota for waking me up,” he said and pulled the sheets off of himself. He stood and yanked his shirt off, grabbing a clean undershirt from his dresser.

“What does your tattoo say?” Uhura asked, still sitting on his bed. Leonard ran a hand over his right side, remembering the fierce sting of the needle at the old fashioned shop that he had gotten it done for just a moment. 

“Hippocratic oath. I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgement, this oath, etcetera. Y’know, all that,” Leonard replied as he jerked the shirt over his head. “Must not play at God. It’s essentially saying not to do all the shit I’ve done.” He pulled a uniform shirt from his closet and put it on over his undershirt. His pants were in a drawer that he quickly opened, grabbed a pair from, and yanked on. He struggled with the button, undoing it and redoing it six times to get it right.

Nyota didn’t respond, but he could feel her eyes burning holes in the back of his uniform. 

“I have another,” Leonard said, talking to distract himself. “Joanna’s birthday, right over my heart.”

“That’s sweet,” Uhura said. “How is she?”

“Good. Good,” Leonard said, pausing in his near frantic, compulsive motions for a moment to look at the framed picture of him and his daughter on top of his dresser. It was one of the very few personal items that hadn’t made it’s way into Jim’s quarters yet. “She’s almost a teenager now.” He turned around to look at Nyota, quickly combing his hair in the mirror by his door. 

“She sounds like such a smart kid, every time you talk about her,” Uhura said, and then stood up.

“She is,” Leonard said. He sat down on the edge of his bed to pull his boots on, and then went into the connected bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth. As he did that, he heard Uhura say something and then leave, but he didn’t catch what she said. He brushed his teeth for three and a half minutes before he could snap himself out of the compulsion. 

He started focusing on his work again. He had barely made any progress recently, and he was starting to come up on a month since Jim’s death. He knew he needed to throw himself into work again, just not so much that Uhura and Spock would take note again.

-

It was another few weeks and plenty of drinks before Leonard stumbled into his next breakthrough. The creature he was testing his newest attempt on came back and responded with near full brain activity. It wasn’t perfect, but he was getting closer, and he had a beer to celebrate. 

Despite knowing he shouldn’t, he walked over to the small curtained off portion of the medbay where Jim’s cryo chamber was being kept. It was laying on the ground, and Leonard pulled up a chair. 

“Hey, Jim,” he started, and then took another sip of beer. It was Gamma shift, so nobody else was in the main section of the medbay. They were all in their offices or working in the appointment only rooms, so he knew he probably wouldn’t be walked in on. He tapped his three longest fingers against the side of his bottle repeatedly as he spoke.

“I’m close, Jim. Today I got so close,” he said and took a deep breath. He could just barely see Jim’s face through the iced glass panel in the cryo chamber. “I’m so close to being able to bring you back.”

Leonard took another breath, this one catching in his throat harder than he would have wanted. He felt his eyes prickling, but he kept talking.

“Joanna called me yesterday. She wanted to know how you were doing, and let me know that she has a girlfriend,” he said and chuckled, wiping his wet eyes before tears could spill down his face. “She’s not even 12, and she has a girlfriend. I don’t think Joce knows, there’s no way that she would let her… Anyways. She’s happy.” Leonard scrubbed his eyes with his sleeve and stared at Jim’s face, downing the end of his beer and wishing he had another on hand. 

“I miss you, kid,” Leonard said quietly. “I miss sleeping in your room. I miss talkin’ to you.” He felt tears running down his face, but he didn’t care. He could spend a few tears on Jim. “I love you,” he said, quiet as a breath, and grabbed his head in his hands. He sobbed, crying full out and freely. He had cried a lot in the last two months, but this was heavier and worse than his other tears had been. 

Leonard sobered up as quickly as he could, taking deep breaths and rubbing his face roughly with his hands. He scratched at his neck roughly and stood up. 

“I’m gonna get you back, Jim,” he said. His voice still shook, but he had a fierce determination about him. He knew he could do it. 

-

It had been two months, three weeks, and six days since Jim’s death when Leonard finished his serum. It worked perfectly in every test he tried, and then it was time to give it to Jim. 

The procedure went quickly. Leonard had put so much work into this process, his entire mind consumed by this one moment for the last two and a half months, that as soon as it was done, he blacked it out from his memory. He wasn’t going to worry about it now. It was up to God. 

Instead, he had a congratulatory drink and took a nap, setting his padd to wake him up if anything about Jim even wavered for a millisecond. He wasn’t woken up even once in his three hour nap, even as the procedure finished and the time frame passed in which he had expected to see some sort of improvement. 

The ship had been docked back on Earth for a couple of days at that point, so Leonard decided that now was a good time to take his padd and head out onto the planet. After all, all he could do then was wait. 

Unfortunately, the second he was off the ship, he was being cornered by employees of Starfleet Academy and brought, begrudgingly, to talk with somebody about what he had done. They had gotten wind of his extended experiment to bring back Jim, and they apparently didn’t love it. Apparently, breaking the Hippocratic Oath meant more than Leonard had let himself believe for a while there. 

He apparently was probably going to have to go to trial, so Leonard went to a bar to get just drunk enough to stomach that information. It’s not like he regretted it. If Jim came back and could continue to save lives like he has been so far, this was all worth it. The academy gave them quarters to stay in during shore leave, so after hanging in a dark corner of a dive bar that he and Jim had frequented during their academy days for a little while, he went back there. 

It was just similar enough to the cadet dorms that Leonard was so used to that he immediately left again. He started walking, no destination in mind, towards the small downtown area near enough to campus that he had spent a little time at back in the day. A lot of the stores were closed, which Leonard expected at the late hour that it was, but a few things still had lights on in the window. 

One of those stores was a small tattoo parlor. 

It wasn’t the one that he had gotten either of his current ones at, but it seemed clean and he had heard of a lot of people back when he was at the academy getting tattoos here that had turned out pretty good. 

After pausing to ask sober future him if he would still be okay with this, he walked in. 

An hour later, he had new ink in the form of a black line on his right side crossing right through one line of his old tattoo: “Above all, I must not play at god.”

-

Jim came back to life two weeks later. 

Those two weeks were spent switching between panicking, drinking (though less, slowly working himself out of the rut he had fallen right back into. Jim didn’t deserve to see him like this), working himself through everything that could’ve gone wrong in endless compulsive loops, working on his testimony for his trial, and sitting at Jim’s bedside. 

When Jim’s heart started beating again, Leonard had been organizing his quarters on the Enterprise just in case… Just in case. He wouldn’t let himself think through that line of reasoning any further. Jim wasn’t going to stay dead. 

His padd dinged, and there was a message from Chapel that just said: ‘come down to medical NOW’. 

Safe to say, he ran down there. He wasn’t even in proper uniform, just jeans and a sweatshirt from the academy that was probably originally Jim’s but he wasn’t quite sure.

“He’s alive, Len,” was the first thing Chapel said to him when he entered. “Look.”

Leonard moved into the sectioned off part of the medical bay where Jim was situated in a hospital bed. Sure enough, the monitors behind him were flashing along with a healthy, steady heartbeat. His brain functions seemed normal as well, and as soon as Leonard had finished checking every monitor for abnormalities he sunk into the chair he had left at Jim’s bedside the day before and let out a long, shaky breath. 

“It worked,” he muttered. 

“It did,” Chapel mused from beside him. “You did it.”

Leonard’s eyes hurt. His heart was aching and his body felt relief for the first time in three months. “He’s alive,” he managed, and glanced at Chapel. “Jim’s alive.”

Chapel rubbed his shoulder warmly and then stepped out of the curtained off area of the medbay. “I’ll leave you to it,” she said softly as she pulled the curtain closed. 

Leonard turned to look at Jim. His face was flushed, more than it had been in the stasis chamber, and his hands weren’t the sickly pale Leonard had come to know. He touched one, and it was warm, and that’s when he started crying. 

It wasn’t entirely silent, but most of the noise was soft sniffling and the sound of skin on skin as he wiped tears off of his face. He flipped Jim’s hand over and touched his wrist, feeling the gentle beat of Jim’s pulse. It almost burned to touch, just the thought of Jim waking up and speaking to him after three months of silence and cold stabbing a flaming dagger into Leonard’s frozen heart. 

After a while, he stopped crying. He didn’t get up or leave, but he wasn’t crying anymore, and that felt like a step forward. 

He sat at Jim’s bedside, just watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest, for a couple of hours. He couldn’t stop marvelling at what he had done: he had brought a man- Jim- back from the dead. He had beaten death.

When he left, it was only because he knew he needed sleep before his trial the next day.

-

The trial went better than Leonard had expected. He had anticipated them revoking his medical license and he had already walked through how he was going to talk Jim into going back out as captain even if Leonard couldn’t be his CMO anymore. 

They didn’t do that, though. He got to keep his medical license, he just had to teach some classes at the academy when he was settled for shore leave, and whenever else the crew was back on earth. He had to give up what was left of his serum to be locked up alongside all of his notes, which he agreed to as long as they let him type them up as a proper journal first. So they would be easier to read, he claimed. They said yes. 

He told Jim about it when he could get back on the ship. Jim was still in a coma, and it felt wrong moving him out of the ship. He knew he had to though, so he recruited Carol, who was sticking around the academy while they were docked, to help him get Jim onto a hover-gurney and get him down into the Academy’s hospital. 

It was an easy transition. Jim didn’t have much attached to him anymore, now that the process was finished and he was breathing, so they got him down without any issue. He also managed to get the hospital to assign him as Jim’s doctor, as he did work there when they were onshore leave, and he felt better after that.

He was watching over Jim, who was alive, and who was also probably going to wake up soon. Leonard felt calmer than he had in months, his fingers tapping out less repetitive patterns on his arms and his compulsions becoming easier and easier to break out of again. 

That was partially because the alcohol hadn’t been mixing well with his OCD meds, but he knew that was going to happen when he started drinking. It wasn’t a big deal. 

When he wasn’t watching over Jim, he was going to the gym, helping out around the rest of the hospital, and finishing writing up his official journal as well as the journal that the academy had agreed to let him publish. It excluded any details of his methodology that could render it duplicatable, but still explained what had happened. He wanted them to be perfect. It wasn’t the first big medical discovery he had made, but it sure was the biggest. 

He stopped drinking again, easier now that he had done it cold turkey once before. He started eating a little better. He called Joanna, Nyota, even Sulu to check in on him, Ben, and Demora. Leonard stopped taking the antidepressants he had found. He made himself get better.

Jim couldn’t ever know what had happened to him when he died.

-

When Jim woke up, Leonard was determined to act normally. In fact, he barely even looked at him. He knew one sight of those blue eyes would make him feel more than he had felt since Jim’s death.

“I died,” Jim said.

“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic,” Leonard replied and glanced at Jim, who seemed so young, there in the hospital bed. “You were barely dead.”

“Bones,” Jim said, cutting off whatever long, drawn-out medical talk Leonard was about to launch into. Hearing that name said from Jim’s mouth made Leonard’s heart twist in his chest.

“Are you feeling okay, Jim?” he asked. He couldn’t quite keep the shake out of his voice this time. 

Jim reached over and tugged on his clean, white medical uniform. “Bones, did you bring me back to life?” he asked quietly. 

Leonard shrugged. “Like I said, you were barely dead. It was the effects of the transfusion that really took a toll. You’ve been out cold for two weeks,” he said and met Jim’s eyes. He wanted to kiss him so badly. 

“Transfusion?” Jim asked, looking away from Leonard’s eyes finally. Leonard took a quick breath and turned back to Jim’s charts. 

“I made a serum from Khan’s blood. It repaired all your irradiated cells, replaced the ones that had died, y’know,” Leonard said. It all seemed so simple when he said it like this. 

Jim didn’t respond for a moment, and Leonard used that time to make sure that everything on Jim’s charts was completely normal. It was. His serum had worked perfectly, it seemed. At least so far. 

“Thank you, Bones,” Jim said finally. 

“It’s my job,” Leonard said without looking over at him.

“Look at me,” Jim demanded. His voice was raspy from disuse and dryness, but he was still a captain. Leonard looked at him. “Thank you, Bones.”

Leonard swallowed really hard. “Of course,” he said. His voice was breaking. He felt like maybe he was too. “I’d do anything to save you.”

Jim lifted an arm. It shook, but he reached up enough for Leonard to understand what Jim wanted. He leaned down and set his face in Jim’s hand. The touch almost made him fall apart. “I love you,” Jim whispered, and Leonard realized he was crying. They both were. “I’m so sorry, Bones, how long were you without me?”

Leonard pulled away for just a second to pull up a chair and sink into it beside Jim, exhausted and wet-faced. “You were dead for almost three months, and you were in a coma for two weeks,” he said. Jim frowned. 

“I- I was dead for three months,” he mumbled. “Khan?”

“Caught and in a cryotube with the rest of his crew,” Leonard said. 

Jim nodded. “How are you?” he asked. Leonard was silent. His head felt like it was going to implode, sending his brain in eight separate directions at once. 

“I’m…,” he began, and then took Jim’s warm, alive hand in his. “I’m okay, considering.”

Jim nodded. “I’m sorry I put you through that,” he said softly. “We didn’t even get to get married yet.”

Leonard snorted, wiping some of the drying tears off his face with his free hand. “Were we plannin’ on it?”

“I was,” Jim said. There wasn’t a hint of joke in his voice. 

Leonard smiled, for real, for the first time in three months. “Then let’s get married, Jim.”

They did. They got married first on Earth where Jim’s brother could come and Leonard could convince Jocelyn to bring Joanna. They had a tiny ceremony, just their closest friends and them. They bought simple silver bands for each other, not needing anything fancy. Leonard couldn’t wear his on the job anyways, but Jim had bought a chain for him to string it on under his uniform. Leonard loved him so much.

The second time they got married, it was because some of the bridge crew hadn’t been able to make it to their first ceremony, and also because they landed on an absolutely beautiful planet that had never been touched by human civilization, or any civilization, before. It was entirely plants, with huge waterfalls and lakes. There was no alien species living there, only beautiful scenery and the Enterprise.

They got married on a small island in the middle of one of the lakes, the rest of the crew standing around them as Scotty married them. They didn’t let go of each other for the entire ceremony. 

Bones had barely let go of Jim since he had come back. But really, he didn’t have to.

Jim was safe, and that was all he needed.

**Author's Note:**

> howdy! thanks for reading! 
> 
> this is (i think?) the heartiest fic in this universe i've created, and it's been a long time coming, at least for me!
> 
> title is from the play Antigone Now because, while it isn't true, it's very Bones!
> 
> let me know if you want anything else in this universe expanded upon! im planning on doing one where Jim finds Bones' video logs from when he was making the serum, also probably in that one he'll find out about Bones' altered tattoo, so stay tuned! 
> 
> the timeline in this and a few other things are different from the movie because i want it to be and nobody can stop me, not even jj abrams himself
> 
> (also catch me on twitter, @ocdbones!)


End file.
